Made a big decision...DESTINY

Well, first of all, I really do not like being in a unstable situation.
The beginning of this semester was just like that. I was not able to making up my mind to decide what courses to take. The first week of school I was like a mess. I run around classroom to classroom to "try-out" which courses would fit into my schedule and which courses I would be interested to take. It was never like this before, not in the pass three college years. Well, I am a senior already.

THR 216 is the last class that get into my schedule.
Talking about THR 216, there are several reasons leading me to take this class.
1) To fulfill a DEC classes. I still need to take a DEC D and DEC I classes.
2) I do not like music nor drawing. I am not good at neither of them.
3) There leave not much choice for me to choose and I chose a class which titled Film Genre. I pretty enjoy with that class. The professor is really nice and funny but then it came to the reading. The reading material was too sophisticated; I read it and I barely understand it. Then, it came to the textbook problem. I tried so many ways to get that book to my hand, but they all FAILED:

-I tried to borrow it from school library; somebody before me borrowed it.
-I tried to buy it from school book store, the last used copy of that book was taken by a person right before me.
-I tried to go to the railroad book store to buy it. They said they went out of copy.
-I tried to request the book online from my local library, my library card expired. I could not request it.
-I tried to request the book online from the Queen library, but I forgot my password and the system did not allow me to change the password.
-Ok. Then I tried to order it online from amazon. Hoping that this time I could finally get the book. It ended up a week later after I paid the money the seller told me that he did not have the book.....

Does that mean something to me? "I SHOULD NOT TAKE THIS CLASS"

I was so upset and I started looking up other choices I have and I found this, THR216.

I did a lot of googling about this class. I know we need to write blog, do a final project in the city, use photo shop, make 3D images, do some filming, youtube...etc. I found all those just from google, very powerful right. Then I came to the class and here I am the last person joined this class.
I hope I would have a big fun time in this class.

Museums

This morning in class we had a brief discussion about museums, their significance & importance in today's digital age. Whether a particular museum displays a culture, an artistic collection, scientific project or historical exhibit, Professor Baldwin briefly questioned their impact in the midst of today's massive digital media & its wide availability.

This immediately brought to my mind the most recent visit I made to a museum:

The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space museum in New York City just a few weeks ago. I've always been fascinated by these incredible man-made vehicles, but had not had the chance to actually visit any or a museum devoted to them. Of course I had spent hours researching facts & statistics online or going through as many images as I could find of whichever one interested me at that moment.

So as I finally visited this museum for the first time, and looking back now, it's incredibly clear

to me the significance of museums today, despite the enormous amount of digital content & media we can find online.

It's certainly very convenient that we can do so much research or even all of it without even

leaving our rooms, but the truth is, if we are truly interested in a subject, there is no substitute to some 'hands-on' experience or research. We can read hundreds of facts online, but only in person we can get a true sense of space, mood, etc. As they say, it's in the details.

Websites as Pets

How's THAT for visual interpretation?
(These images display how easy and potentially humorous it is to sum up the basic qualities of something like a website, find its analogous animal, and display it as an image of that animal with a witty caption to go along with it. The commonly known phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" has never been truer; there are certainly an endless amount of connections that can be drawn between the website stated and the animal chosen to represent it.)
Source: collegehumor.com

Family and work

Class questions: Who am I as I go out the door? Who are my parents/friends/boyfriend?

Interestingly, the two are inherently connected. Even though we think of ourselves as very much individuals.

I spent this past summer doing a newspaper internship at The Oregonian, a 250,000+ circulation paper in Portland. On one of my last days there, I had an absolutely amazing conversation with Tom Hallman Jr., an absolutely amazing narrative reporter.

One of the things that struck me was how he started, in a sense, interviewing me right off the bat. He believes, correctly, that we view the world through our experiences, our parents' histories and what they do.

My dad has held many jobs since he arrived in New York in the '70s. He was a busboy at a restaurant for some time. Then he drove a yellow taxi for a long while. His experiences are fascinating. I can tell him a random address in the city -- "Can you pick me up in the city? I don't know where... Um. 1633 Broadway." And he knows right off the top of his head that it's at 50th Street and Broadway.

For a long time now, he has been a doorman at a building in Queens. Inherently fascinating job, sociologically. There's actually a book by a Columbia sociology professor all about doormen in the city. It's also a union job. Which is awesome. For us.

When I was little, my mom used to clean rich people's apartments in the city. I never really understood this back then. I knew she went to people's houses for work but it just never really crossed my mind to wonder. Or to really realize that my mother was cleaning other people's houses. Even though she went to high school right here in Queens, she couldn't go to college after high school because her papers had expired.

She finally got to go to college after getting her citizenship. She earned a two year degree in four years by working during the day and taking classes at night. Sometimes after dinner my dad, my sister and I would walk through the darkened parking lot toward the mall to surprise her at the train station. She's an occupational therapy assistant at a nursing home now, making a good living. And I guess that's how my family avoided the pink collar.

-- Carolina Hidalgo

Free 2011 Autodesk programs for Students!

Free 2011 Autodesk programs for Students!